With COVID sales falling and patent protections expiring, Pfizer is forecasting its 2026 revenue to be in the range of $59.5 billion to $62.5 billion. The midpoint of the projection ($61 billion) would be a decline from this year’s estimated revenue of $62 billion—which the company reaffirmed on Tuesday. It would also be an additional slide from Pfizer’s 2024 revenue of $63.6 billion.
Built into the 2026 guidance is a $1.5 billion decline in sales of its COVID products—from an estimated $6.5 billion this year to $5 billion in expected sales next year. The company also expects to sustain a $1.5 billion hit from the loss of exclusivity (LOE) of its products.
As those LOEs escalate in the coming years—to $3 billion-plus in 2027 and $6-plus in 2028—the drugmaker said that it doesn’t expect to see growth until 2029.
With the updated guidance, Pfizer’s share price fell by 5% by mid-morning on Tuesday.
“Once 2028 is behind us, the vast majority of those LOEs are done and the growth drivers that we invest in over the next several years will be maintained and that should allow us to begin to accelerate the top line,” Pfizer chief financial officer Dave Denton said in a conference call.
As for its COVID products, Denton said that sales of its antiviral Paxlovid are tumbling at a higher rate than those for its mRNA vaccine.
“Paxlovid is more significantly affected as its utilization is directly related to infection rates of the COVID virus,” Denton said. “Comirnaty has shown a slower rate of decline as patients continue to seek protection from COVID via vaccinations despite the narrowing of government eligibility recommendations.”
After removing the effects of the LOEs and the COVID products, Pfizer is projecting an approximate 4% increase in operational growth (PDF).
In April of this year, Pfizer revealed that it was upping the ante on its cost-cutting efforts, plotting an additional $1.2 billion in reductions largely tied to selling, informational and administrative functions.
“We remain on track to deliver about $7.2 billion in total combined net cost savings, with the majority of the savings now expected by the end of 2026 rather than in 2027,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in the conference call.
As for the company’s reliance on its deep vaccine portfolio, Bourla reassured investors that the current threat to sales of its products in the U.S. is an “anomaly.”
In the third quarter, Pfizer’s numbers (PDF) were particularly indicative of the erosion in demand for immunizations in the U.S. While sales of its Prevnar franchise of pneumococcal vaccines were up 18% year over year outside of the U.S., they were down 12% domestically. The same was true of Comirnaty, which saw a 9% sales increase internationally and a 25% decline in the U.S.
“Vaccines are an essential part of any healthcare system,” Bourla said. “It is the most cost-effective intervention to prevent illness in the world and that will continue. We’re not going away. I can assure you, we are not going back to Louis Pasteur times or before his times.”
Bourla added that Pfizer has not altered the way it views its long-term investments on vaccines.
“Let’s not forget, the CDC used to be the most reliable and credible organization in the world, that everybody was looking up at,” Bourla said. “I think we need to let the whole thing play [out]. It is an anomaly that will correct itself. It’s mostly driven politically.”